


When It All Comes Down To Dust

by ruric



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Community: slashthedrabble, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-01-07
Updated: 2005-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-07 20:14:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruric/pseuds/ruric
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel doesn't trust words. He remembers how easy it was to lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When It All Comes Down To Dust

Angel doesn't trust words. He remembers how easy it was to lie. 

Vampire senses are different - the demon provides increased sensory input, raising the threshold beyond human comprehension. Angel doesn't believe words unless he's in the same room as the speaker – able to smell and taste them, hear the vibrations of their words on the air. When people lie to him he can hear it in timbre of their voice, the minute cracks and wavers undetectable to human ears, the millisecond hesitation for breath.

Lindsey had lied to him from the moment they met.

In Winters' office Lindsey's soft, husky voice had twined down Angel's spine, slithered into his groin and flexed, igniting a spark he never expected to feel again. Whilst Lindsey made even, measured threats in a voice raked by the claws of Cupid, Angel heard what lay below the words and felt their murmur on the air, a thousand little feather strokes brushing against his hair and pressing into his skin. It was the voice that pulled him close and made him tuck the card back into Lindsey's pocket, to be able to touch him and feel his heartbeat. To smell him up close.

Lindsey only tried to explain himself once, and Angel shut him down because what Lindsey's voice does to him shouldn't be possible. When he listens to Lindsey speak he forgets about saving the world, forgets about the innocents, forgets everything, because the voice fills him, and he _wants_ to believe anything it says.

Lindsey's voice has been marinated in rage, smoke, musk and old oak-ripened whisky. Rubbed raw by loss and bitter Texan winds and warmed by the dying embers of a burnt out fire, in an abandoned farmhouse, after the beggars have gone. It makes him think of cinnamon and sage and the thorniness of saguaro cacti, of sweeping plains and blasted red sandstone. Makes him think of a mustang, running wild, eyes rolling, nostrils flaring redly as the rope finally closes around its throat. 

It's a voice of power and Angel hadn’t even begun to grasp how much power until he heard Lindsey sing. He sings with the voice of a fallen angel, depth and tone sharpened by inhaling the sulphurous brimstone of hell. 

He keeps coming back to hear Lindsey say his name, voice curling over every syllable like honey around gravel. Comes back for the fire that ignites every time Lindsey snarls a curse at him - no-one says the word "fuck" as hungrily or knowingly as Lindsey. He keeps coming back to hear Lindsey use hot, dark words that slide like hooks into his gut, eviscerating him when Lindsey's voice breaks on a breathy moan, when he hits the right spot.

The challenge he set himself, from the very first time he heard Lindsey speak, is to wrestle him back from the edge – because if he can save Lindsey then maybe he can save himself.

And if he can't save Lindsey? 

Then he'll have to stop him.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "sound" prompt at the LJ community [slashthedrabble](http://slashthedrabble.livejournal.com).


End file.
